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James Lovelock, scientist and author best known for the Gaia hypothesis. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some leading voices in the Global Warming Gospel Choir are now abandoning the old climate crisis hymnal. One is James Lovelock, the father of the “Gaia” theory that the entire Earth is a single living system who predicted that continued human CO2 emissions will bring about climate calamity. In 2006 he claimed: “Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where climate remains tolerable.” Time magazine featured Lovelock as one of 13 “Heroes of the Environment” in a 2007 article (along with Al Gore, Mikhail Gorbachev and Robert Redford).

Recently, however, he has obviously cooled on global warming as a crisis, admitting to MSNBC that he overstated the case and now acknowledges that: “…we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books…mine included…because it looked clear cut…but it hasn’t happened.” Lovelock pointed to Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and Tim Flannery’s “The Weather Makers” as other alarmist publications.

The 92-year-old Lovelock went on to note, “…the climate is doing its usual tricks…there’s nothing much happening yet even though we were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now.” He added, “The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time.” Yet the temperature “has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising…carbon dioxide has been rising, no question about that.”

Fritz Vaherenholt, a socialist founder of Germany’s environmental movement who headed the renewable energy division of the country’s second largest utility company, has recently coauthored a new book titled “The Cold Sun: Why the Climate Disaster Won’t Happen”. In it he raises a man-made blizzard of criticism charging the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with gross incompetence and dishonesty, most particularly regarding fear-mongering exaggeration of known climate influence of human CO2 emissions.

Dr. Vahrenholt’s distrust of the IPCC’s objectivity and veracity took root two years ago when he became an expert reviewer for their report on renewable energy. After discovering numerous errors, he reported those inaccuracies to IPCC officials, only to have them simply brushed aside. Stunned by this, he asked himself: “Is this the way they approached climate assessment reports?” He came to wonder: “…if the other IPCC reports on climate change were similarly sloppy.”

This concern prompted Vahrenholt to dig into the IPCC’s 2007 climate report, and he was horrified by what he found. On top of discovering numerous factual errors, there were issues involving 10 years of stagnant temperatures, failed predictions, ClimateGate e-mails, and informative discussions with dozens of other elite skeptical scientists.

Vaherenholt concludes in an interview which appeared in the German news publication Bild that: “… IPCC decision-makers are fighting tooth and nail against accepting the roles of the oceans, sun, and soot.” Accordingly, IPCC models are completely out of whack. “The facts need to be discussed sensibly and scientifically, without first deciding on the results.”

The study compared measured versus model-simulated temperature trends at six global sites according to two different scenarios; one with greenhouse gas influence plus aerosol influences, and the other with greenhouse temperature influences only. Results showed that while both scenarios failed to reproduce observed temperature recordings, the one using only greenhouse influences demonstrated the greatest deviation from reality: “…where the [greenhouse gas scenario] trends are clearly overestimated.”

Schellnhuber recently admitted in a speech to agricultural experts that: “warmer temperatures and high CO2 concentrations in the air could very well lead to higher agricultural yields.”